Saturday, 28 May 2016

A Piece of Cake #1 Octo-Choc

I love baking and could happily spend hours or even days making cakes, biscuits and pastries of all shapes, sizes and flavours. Shows like the Great British Bake Off are perfect for inspiration and show us that you don’t need to attend pastry schools to create fantastic bakes. However not everyone has hours to spend in the kitchen mixing away so here I present my new section ‘A Piece of Cake’, simple recipes that are quick and easy to follow and are sure to put a smile on everyone’s face.

Octo-Choc:

A colleague of mine told me that for years he has dreamed of creating a cake that contained 8 different forms and types of chocolate: Octo-Choc. When it came to my turn for Cake Friday I wanted to turn his dream into a reality. So here it is!

The base is a simple chocolate sponge made with the usual ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, butter and of course chocolate (recipe below). As a rule of thumb the more luxurious the ingredients used the more decadent and flavoursome the sponge will be. To do this I would recommend using melted chocolate in the sponge batter but I had a tub of Green & Black’s organic cocoa powder in my pantry so opted for this. It then counted as one of my eight types of chocolate.

For the sponge:

250g unsalted butter

300g caster sugar

200g self-raising flour

1tsp vanilla extract

Pinch of salt

50g cocoa powder

100g chocolate drops (any kind or mixture)- I used milk chocolate, number two of my octo-choc

Top tip #1: Most recipes will say to cream the butter and sugar together which, depending on how hard the butter is, can take a while especially if you don’t own an electric mixer. To avoid all this hard work simply melt the butter in a pan on a gentle heat to avoid burning it, allow to cool for 5 minutes then mix together with the eggs and sugar. This also avoids curding the mixture and reducing the chances of producing lumps in the batter.

The mixture can be split into two circular tins, as I have done, to make a layer cake or poured into a larger rectangular tin for a tray bake. Whichever you decide please remember to grease the tin and line with baking parchment to get the lovely tasting cake back out again.

Top tip #2: All cake sponges will bake at 180°C it is just the time that will vary. I baked this cake for 30 minutes but all ovens are different so I suggest 25-35 minutes will do.

Now to decorate! This is where 3-8 of octo-choc come into play. I simply went to my local shop and bought a range of chocolate sweets to decorate the cake with. You can have fun here and use whatever and as much as you like. I opted for a layer of chocolate fudge and Galaxy Counters for the centre of mine then covered the entire cake with the rest of the chocolate fudge. Normally I make my own chocolate fudge but out of ease and because again I had a tin in my pantry I used shop bought, it tasted good! For on top of the cake I used Jazzles, Rolos, Malteasers and M&Ms.

I think you would agree it looks delicious and judging by how quickly it disappeared in work it must have tasted good too. I am so glad I was able to make Octo-Choc into a reality.

That looks amazing! I'm not sure who the biggest genius is - you for making it or your colleague for dreaming it! Love the idea of a section of easy recipes too - I'm not much of a cooking fan, so I like simple recipes! (Lucy/R is for Hoppit)